


paradigm shift

by realcasually



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mastermind, F/M, Mastermind Naegi Makoto, Psychopaths in love~
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 17:56:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1046847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/realcasually/pseuds/realcasually
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she knows immediately which role she is to play</p>
            </blockquote>





	paradigm shift

Mukuro can tell exactly what kind of mood he’s in every time she enters the room. This time he looks at her with those eyes, the hungry, spiteful ones, and she knows immediately which role she is to play this time.

She bows her head, waiting for instruction. It comes.

“Come here.”

She does. She moves to his side in four steps, sitting down on his lap, head down. She can’t see him. She doesn’t need to anymore.

His hands curl around her neck, grasping slowly.  
“I could kill you right now, Mukuro-chan.” –chan. It implies his superiority: the narcissism in his voice, the arrogance in his movements, they tell her what he needs now.

He is the tyrant: she is his servant.

“I could! I could betray you now, end your life with my bare hands! What a despair that would be!”

He laughs, and it’s cold and cruel. She pauses, quiet, then speaks, her voice cleanly cut.

“You could.”

and he shifts

He nuzzles her back, sighing. “I won’t, though~! You understand, Mukuro-san, the beauty of despair~”

-san. Now they’re almost equals, a friendly honorific. Now he needs her, and her own role shifts with his, like it has so many times before.

“The others, they don’t get it! They don’t get it, they just cling to their disgusting hope, and it makes me feel sick! Sick, sick, sick…”

He is the damaged boy: she knows how to quell him.

She can move now, and she does, a cool hand pressed to the side of his face, her lips grazing his forehead, another hand tucking a stray strand of his soft brown hair back into place.

“It’s alright, Naegi-kun. I’ll always be here to understand, whenever you need me.”

and he shifts

The bear comes out now, raised in front of his face as he nods his face, his voice a little higher, a rasp in his throat.

“Upupupu, I know that, Mukuro! You’re the perfect disciple of despair~” A plush hand pats her head condescendingly, but that’s not how he means it, not when he’s using this personality. 

The narcissist is condescending on purpose, the mastermind just doesn’t understand emotions any better than she used to. The psychopath is almost innocent, and it’s the one she likes most: those are the times she can tell him she loves him, and those are the times he’ll reply, and tell her he loves her too.  
Monobear’s always been hard to deal with, so she just nods politely, muttering a soft thanks.

He is the sadist: she is his sycophant.

He goes on about the glory of despair for a while more, and she has to agree in more ways than one. When she came back from Fenrir, she was broken. More broken than he is. Naegi can’t choose what to feel: Mukuro could barely feel anything.

She thought Hope’s Peak, with all its classes, might teach her emotion again, but it didn’t. Nothing worked. Until he found her.

He looked the same now as he did on that day, his usual green hoodie gone and replaced with the one he’d made modelled after Monobear, half-white half-black with the ears on the hood and everything.   
He said he’d seen her, watched her, knew what she needed. She needed to feel something again, and he could teach her. He could show her hope, and he could show her despair. All she had to do was help him teach it to the world too.

She had agreed almost straight away. And Naegi fulfilled his promise, and he showed her hope, and he showed her despair.

And he showed her love.

and he shifts

Gone’s the childishness now. He leans back in his seat, lacing his fingers together and resting his chin on them. 

“You followed my orders? Enoshima’s body has been disposed of?”

She nods, a slight shake of the head to slip into the apathy she knew so well, the mindset of a killer.

He is the mastermind. She is his soldier.

“Yes, sir. I waited until everybody had gone before throwing it in the garbage. …where she belongs.”

The last comment hadn’t quite been needed, and the mastermind didn’t like it when things weren’t needed. But at this point, she really didn’t care. He’d freed her from her bitch sister, the abusive airhead ‘fashion girl’ who had been the bane of her life before Hope’s Peak, before Super High-School Level Despair, before Naegi.

She has to say something.

“…thank you, sir.”

He smiles, almost as if he’s the psychopath again, but then it’s back to business.

“Good. If everything goes according to the plan, they’ll still think the body is yours. The trial will be against Kirigiri from the start.” No honorifics now. They don’t matter now.

and he shifts

The narcissist is back, so she bows her head as he rages on about despair. His fingers idly trace circles on her throat. It doesn’t matter. She knows he won’t kill her.

Maybe if she was any different, he would. To feel the despair of killing a loved one, to watch the despair of betrayal on their face… It would sate Naegi no end. But she wouldn’t feel that despair. That kind of betrayal, from him, would render all the progress she’d made with her emotions worthless. She’d be a soldier to the end, unfeeling, cold.

Killing her wouldn’t bring her despair. He’s denied his own despair.

Somehow, that makes him despair more. It’s an endless cycle, and it’s why she lives, and it’s why he loves her.

And she loves him.

“You’re to make contact with the rest of SHSL Despair on the outside. Let them know that the finale’s coming, we’ll be rejoining them soon. We’ll take the school as a trophy once the game is over, so I’ll need proper furnishings and stuff.”

She nods again. “Yes, sir. Shall I go now?”

He nods in kind, his attention already back on the screens that surround him, eyes flicking from one to the other. She stands after a moment, moving toward the door when she hears his voice again.

“Mukuro?”

She turns. It looks like the psychopath, a childish innocence, but it’s not the manic smile she associates that voice with. In fact, it’s almost like the act he puts on for the rest of the students, the personality he uses to build up their trust and their hope before he crushes it all with one brilliant reveal, that he was the mastermind, that Makoto Naegi, the one they all trusted, was the one who killed their friends and forced them to do the same.

“…Yes, Naegi?”

“Do you love me?”

She doesn’t hesitate before nodding once, rapidly. No matter what he’s like, that answer will always be the same. “Of course, Naegi.”

He smiles too, almost sweetly. “I love you too.”

He turns away from her, back to his bank of screens, and she finds herself smiling as she slips out.

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry for probably awful misuse of Japanese names and suffixes.


End file.
